Deborah Turns 60

Today is our celebration of Deborah's 60th birthday (Oct 27). It's hard to believe we are reaching this "stage", when I can picture us meeting 34 years ago as if it were yesterday. I guess we were "kids" then - 4 years younger than our own kids are today, merging our happy hippy selves into a wonderful journey that will undoubtedly unfold to the end of our days. People are frequently surprised that we, who divorced over 25 years ago, have this best-friend-ness, but it surprises me that it isn't the norm among those who were married. The things we saw in each other in that blaze of coming together were true. Who better to co-parent with and share my inner self with than one who I respect, admire, and who knows me inside-out? In the scheme of things, our marriage was a chapter in our journey.

This afternoon we'll tell stories. I have so many to choose from. I remember the New Year's Day, when she thought we should mark the day in the way we wanted the year to turn out. She got to work baking delicious and healthy muffins and it was my job to go out distribute them to homeless folks. The fly in the batter was that the Manhattan homeless of 1984 were quite wary of strangers bearing food. One after another turned me down, no matter where I went. We had to bring all the bags full of muffins to a shelter instead.

The rainy day in Seattle when I ran from the car into a store and came back to find Deborah in the back seat and an elderly woman in the passenger seat. She'd been waiting without an umbrella at a bus stop and Deborah offered her a ride. After 45 minutes of looking for her destination, it turned out she thought we were in Manchester, England.

The terrible day that my Mom was killed in a crash with a drunk driver; Deborah and I were living apart and she was traveling in Mexico. I was subletting a farmhouse in Sonoma. We hadn't spoken in a month. I left for St. Louis. Deborah had a weird feeling and called the house that day. It should have just rang and rang in the empty place, but for some unfathomable reason, a friend of the woman I was subletting from had stopped by and picked it up. He had heard from the neighbors what happened. In those days before answering machines and cell phones there was no way for Deborah to reach me from Mexico and nobody would be answering the phone in my Mom's empty apartment. She rode buses, a train, and a plane for two days and walked into the St. Louis funeral home minutes before the service began. Now THAT surprises me, so much more than our enduring bond.

Birthday Partners

Antonin Checkov

My birthday was January 17th and I happened to catch a short feature called "Today's Almanac" on KALW, the smaller NPR station in San Francisco. I don't remember ever hearing it before as I don't often tune to KALW. But I found out about some very cool people whose birthday I share....





Anton Checkov, the great Russian "slice of life" story and play writer;
James Earl Jones, the actor who played Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope;
Muhammed Ali, the Champ
Al Capone, Chicago gangster
Benjamin Franklin (of course I knew that already; his b'day is written on many calendars)
Betty White

I wish I could have attended some of their birthday parties.

P.S. Two major earthquakes and the patent for the San Francisco cable car happened on Jan 17. January is named for Janus (Ianuarius), the god of the doorway.

birthday gift story

My dad turns 80 this April and last weekend I watched a videotaped interview I did with him ten years ago. My brothers want me to make a video for his birthday party. The party will be part of a full weekend which, of course, includes a Sabbath in an Orthodox setting. Family gatherings that fall on Jewish holidays, or even Sabbath, always cause me a lot of anxiety and apprehension - especially when Sally and my sons are coming too.

But the tape draws me in completely. I never watched it before. He talks about starting out in business with only a religious Jewish high school education, borrowing money to buy a kosher butcher shop in a little town he'd probably never been to - Peoria, Il, after working in the Chicago stockyards for three years. Marrying my mom as teen agers; paying $37 per month for a basement apartment as newlyweds; discovering that he could sell ad specialties with only catalogs in hand and starting "SelMor Advertising"; finding investors and buying a couple of machines to print ads on giveaway plastic items; ("The Graduate" with its immortal line about "plastics" had a special meaning for me.) Somehow, it's easy to see my dad as a young man braving a largely unknown world - just a few layers beneath the wrinkles and white hair of this later version. Stories pass by so quickly in retrospect, like the pages of a thick novel blown over to the final chapter outside in a sudden breeze.

It touches me deeply to hear of his early years. The story of a young man wanting to make a life....wanting "to become a man" as he says in the tape. A story so universal and far removed from our father-son dynamics.

Stories became nearly impossible to exchange across the chasm between my secular life and his orthodox life, a gulf that widened over 35 years as we traveled different trajectories. But this early chapter from an age- as young as my sons are now- is a time-warped-sort-of-bridge.

Tomorrow, I turn 55, and the connected, compassionate feelings that Ab's "young man stories" have imparted feel like a wonderful birthday gift one day early......or 35 years late depending which way the breeze is blowing.